Big Blue names former Bank of America CTO as head of cloud business

IBM announces former Bank of America CTO Howard Boville as the new head of its cloud business. (Getty Images)

The winds of changes swept through IBM on Monday as the company named Howard Boville as the new head of its cloud business. Boville, who was CTO of Bank of America, replaced Arvind Krishna, who moved into the CEO role at IBM.

In late January, IBM announced Ginni Rometty was stepping down as CEO after four decades with the company, and that Krishna would take over the helm at Big Blue on April 6.

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Boville and Krishna have crossed paths before. In November, IBM announced it had designed a financial services-ready public cloud by collaborating with Bank of America.

The financial cloud, which is built on IBM’s public cloud and uses Red Hat's OpenShift technology, was designed to help address the requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency.

According to Reuters, Krishna, who played a key role in IBM's $34 billion deal to buy Red Hat, informed his employees Monday morning of Boville's hiring. While IBM still trails Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, it has made in-roads in the cloud sector.

IBM also announced on Monday it named Paul Cormier as the new CEO of Red Hat. Cormier took over for Jim Whitehurst, who was named IBM's president in January. Prior to being named CEO, Cormier was Red Hat's president of products and technologies.

Cormier, who joined Red Hat in 2001, is credited with pioneering the subscription model that helped the company better serve enterprises, according to Red Hat. Cormier took part in more than 25 deals at Red Hat, and spearheaded its open source hybrid cloud projects.